"Apollo and Daphne"...3

Daphne is frightened. Apollo is described as preying on her: “When a hound starts a rabbit,/ In an open field, one runs for game, one safety/…So ran the god and girl, one swift in hope,/ The other in terror.” She is “deathly pale” and when she sees her father she cries, “O help me,/ If there is any power in the rivers,/ Change and destroy the body which has given/ Too much delight!” I find it interesting that Daphne feels guilty: She thinks that it is her fault for being too beautiful. What we have portrayed here is power and vulnerability. Why does the one being terrorized feel that she is to blame?

It gets worse: Her father turns her into a tree. “Her limbs grew numb and heavy, her soft breasts/ Were closed with delicate bark, her hair was leaves,/ Her arms were branches, and her speedy feet/ Rooted and held, and her head became a tree top.” Apollo loves her still and he “placed his hand/ Where he had hoped and felt the heart still beating/ Under the bark; and he embraced the branches/ As if they still were limbs, and kissed the wood,/ And the wood shrank from his kisses.” Terrified, Daphne literally becomes petrified; she is trapped in her metamorphosis. The beating heart shows that inside the tree there is still a young woman. Her shrinking from the unwanted kisses shows that she still feels repugnance but she’s trapped and helpless to stop Apollo‘s attentions.

Apollo exclaims that if she can’t be his bride she will be his tree. “Let the laurel/ Adorn, henceforth, my hair, my lyre, my quiver/…And as my head/ Is always youthful, let the laurel always/ Be green and shining!” Daphne, then, has been given immortality. However, is this a prize or a punishment? It seems to me that what Ovid has portrayed is endless torment. He may also be making a social statement: Apollo, the god of order and stability, has been overpowered by passion; it is uncontrollable emotion that can destabilize the social and moral order. The question, of course, is what or who does Apollo symbolize?